A citation tells you exactly where you found a piece of information. For a book, it combines the author, title, and publication information with the page or entry you consulted. In RootsMagic, the book information is stored in Master Source and the page or entry is stored in Citation Details.

The citation is stored separately from its links to people and facts. This lets you reuse one citation for several facts without entering the same reference repeatedly.

New source, new citation, or reuse?

Create a new source when the material is not already represented in your source collection. SourceWizard helps you select a template and enter the source and its citation together.

Create a new citation under an existing source when you consulted a different specific item: another page in the same book, for example.

Reuse an existing citation when it identifies the same specific item. A record that supplies several facts can be cited for each of them. Later corrections to that citation affect all of those uses.

Copy a citation when you want to use most of its information but change something, such as the page number. You can change the copy's details without changing the original citation. Both still refer to the same source. See Using Sources and Citations.

Where to work

To document a person, family, or fact, open its Sources list in Edit Person. To see all the citations of a book or other source, open the main Sources page and click the number in that source's Citations column. A citation created on the main Sources page is saved for later; you still need to add it to the person or fact it supports.

See Adding a citation, Editing a citation, Citation List, and Citation quality.